Abstract
Biology solves the problem of communicating information through cell membranes by means of conformationally switchable proteins, of which the most important are the G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). The lecture will describe the design and synthesis of dynamic foldamers as artificial mimics of GPCRs, with the ultimate aim of controlling function in the interior of an artificial vesicle. Techniques that allow detailed dynamic conformational information to be extracted both in solution and in the membrane phase will be described.

About the Speaker
Jonathan Clayden was born in Uganda in 1968, grew up in the county of Essex, in the East of England, and was an undergraduate at Churchill College, Cambridge. In 1992 he completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge with Dr Stuart Warren. After postdoctoral work with Professor Marc Julia at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he moved in 1994 to Manchester as a lecturer. In 2001 he was promoted to full professor, and in 2015 he moved to a position as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

His research interests encompass various areas of synthesis and stereochemistry, particularly where conformation has a role to play: asymmetric synthesis, atropisomerism, organolithium chemistry, long-range stereocontrol. He has pioneered the field of dynamic foldamer chemistry for the synthesis of artificial molecules with biomimetic function.

He is a co-author of the widely used textbook “Organic Chemistry”, and his book “Organolithiums: Selectivity for Synthesis” was published by Pergamon in 2002.

He has received the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Meldola (1997) and Corday Morgan (2003) medals, Stereochemistry Prize (2005), Hickinbottom Fellowship (2006) and Merck Prize (2011), and the Novartis Young European Investigator Award (2004). He held senior research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society in 2003-4 and 2009-10 and has held a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award and a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant (€2.5M).

Abstract
Major transformations of extracellular matrix (ECM) accompany the onset and progression of many chronic diseases, yet it remains poorly understood whether and how the ECM orchestrates the deterioration of healthy to pathological tissues. These processes are regulated by a complex interplay of cells with their ECM, whereby the biochemical composition as well as the physical features of ECM are well recognized to regulate cell functions. Deciphering how diverse and often synergistic stimuli steer a multicellular system towards disease can be more easily studied utilizing de novo-grown tissues in microtissue platforms as they are more easily to control and to quantitatively analyze. Our progress towards this goal and how to translate the findings to the organ level will be discussed.

About the Speaker
Viola Vogel is a Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology heading the Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Trained as a Physicist at the Frankfurt University, Germany, and after completing her graduate research at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (1987), she spent two years as postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of California Berkeley. As faculty member, she joined the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1990 to start a Molecular Bioengineering Program and moved there through the ranks to Full Professor. She was the Founding Director of the Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Washington (1997-2003) prior to her move to Switzerland in 2004, where she initially joined the Department of Materials and then co-founded the new Department of Health Sciences and Technology (2012).